- author, Nadine Yousif
- role, BBC News, Toronto
Logan LaFaniere woke up one morning in October 2022 to an empty driveway.
His brand new Ram Rebel truck, purchased just a year and a half earlier, was gone. Security camera footage showed two hooded men breaking into the pickup in the middle of the night outside his Milton, Ontario, home and then driving off with ease.
A few months later, that very same truck was listed on a cars for sale website in Ghana, some 8,500 kilometers across the ocean.
“The smoking gun was the laptop holder I had placed behind the driver’s seat for my son and there was rubbish he had put in it,” Lafernierre told the BBC.
The same cluttered condition was seen in photos of the car’s listing, he said.
“I had no doubt that it was my car.”
Lafaniere’s story is not unusual: More than 105,000 cars were stolen in Canada in 2022 — about five every minute. Among the victims was Canada’s federal justice minister, whose government-issued Toyota Highlander XLE was stolen twice.
Earlier this summer, Interpol named Canada among the top 10 countries for worst car theft out of 137 in its database, a “remarkable” achievement, given that Canada only began combining data with the international police organization in February, a spokesman said.
Authorities say once stolen, the vehicles are either used to commit other violent crimes, sold to other unsuspecting Canadians locally or shipped overseas to be resold.
Interpol says it has recovered more than 1,500 cars stolen from Canada around the world since February, and that about 200 more continue to be identified each week, mainly in ports in other countries.
Car theft has become so widespread that the Insurance Bureau of Canada has declared it a “national crisis”, saying insurers had to pay out more than CAD1.5 billion (US$1 billion, £860 million) in car theft claims last year.
The problem has forced police departments across the country to issue public notices on how to protect vehicles from theft.
Meanwhile, some Canadians are taking things into their own hands, from installing tracking devices in their cars to hiring private neighborhood watchmen.
Some who can afford it have installed retractable bollards, like those found at banks and embassies, in their driveways to try to deter thieves.
Nauman Khan, who lives in Mississauga, a city just outside Toronto, started the car stop installation business after he and his brother had their cars stolen.
In one attempted burglary, Mr Khan said the thieves broke into his house while his wife and young children were asleep. They were looking for the keys to his Mercedes GLE, which was parked outside the front door, but when he confronted them they fled.
After that “traumatic” experience, they sold all their cars except for two “modest” family cars.
Khan said through his business he’s now hearing similar stories from people across the Toronto area.
“It’s very busy,” he says. “One client had so many break-ins on their street that they had a security guard outside their house every night because they didn’t feel safe.”
Alexis Piquero, director of the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, said it’s surprising that car theft is so prevalent in Canada, given the country’s small population compared with other countries such as the United States and Britain.
“(Canada) doesn’t have as many port cities as the United States does,” Piquero said.
The US, Canada and UK have all seen a surge in car thefts since the coronavirus pandemic, but the latest data from each country shows that Canada has a higher theft rate (262.5 vehicles per 100,000 people) than England and Wales (220 vehicles per 100,000 people).
This is also pretty close to the situation in the United States, where there are roughly 300 vehicle thefts per 100,000 people, based on 2022 data.
The recent increase is due in part to a global car shortage caused by the pandemic, which has increased demand for both used and new cars.
Elliot Silverstein, director of government relations for the Canadian Automobile Association, said the market for certain vehicle models is growing internationally and that car theft is one of the biggest sources of revenue for organized crime groups.
But Silverstein said the way Canadian ports are operated makes them more vulnerable to this type of theft than other countries.
“The port system is more focused on what’s coming into the country than what’s being taken out of the country,” he said, adding that once vehicles are crammed into shipping containers at the port, it becomes difficult to access them.
Police were able to recover several stolen vehicles.
Additionally, between mid-December and the end of March, border patrol and police officers inspected 400 shipping containers at the Port of Montreal, finding approximately 600 stolen vehicles.
But experts say such a task may be difficult to pull off given the volume of goods that pass through the port: About 1.7 million containers passed through the Port of Montreal in 2023 alone.
Port officials in most cases do not have the authority to inspect containers, and only border patrol officers can open containers in customs-controlled areas without a warrant.
Outdated technology is also a problem.
Patrick Brown, mayor of Brampton, another Ontario city with a high car theft problem, recently visited the Port of Newark container terminal in New Jersey to compare inspection methods in the United States and Canada.
He told the National Post that US authorities were “deploying scanners, measuring density and working closely with local law enforcement.”
“We don’t do this in Canada,” he said.
The Canadian government announced in May that it would invest millions of dollars to strengthen the CBSA’s ability to search shipping containers. Police will also get additional funding to combat car thefts in the region.
But Silverstein said he believes the missing piece of the puzzle is the automakers themselves.
“Everybody is working on recovering vehicles, but my focus is on why not make it harder to steal vehicles in the first place,” he said.
Meanwhile, car owners like Lafaniere are still wondering what to do to keep their cars safe.
After his Ram Rebel was stolen, LaFanier traded in his Toyota Tundra, which he called his “dream truck.”
This time, he fitted an engine immobiliser to prevent thieves from starting the car easily, a tag tracker in case it is stolen and even a club on the steering wheel just in case.
Undaunted, the duo pulled up to LaFanier’s driveway and tried to steal the Tundra, but the thieves had trouble and resorted to smashing the back window to gain access to the car.
The commotion woke LaFaniere up and he called 911, but the attacker fled in the four minutes it took police to arrive.
He paid for the repairs on the brand new truck and sold it.
He said the whole ordeal had been “disheartening.”